AI multilingual tools for social innovation: new perspectives on civic technologies, digital empowerment and inclusive governance

Civic technologies are increasingly promoted as tools to enhance democratic participation, decision-making, collective action, and digitally enabled governance. This study examines the emergence of AI-enabled multilingual civic platforms and their potential to support inclusive participation and social innovation in linguistically diverse democracies. The study adopts a conceptual and exploratory research design, supported by qualitative analysis, to enhance the theoretical clarity of contested concepts such as digital empowerment and social innovation. A systematic review of 158 civic technology platforms was also conducted to examine the role and limitations of major public resource repositories in promoting multilingual democratic processes through three dimensions: social innovation, digital democracy, and civic technology. The findings show that instrumentalist approaches to social innovation – prioritising efficiency, performance, and scalability of civic tools implementation – predominate over approaches that emphasising empowerment, deliberation, and changes in social and governance relations. Most platforms are technology-driven rather than human-centered, with limited attention to inclusion, linguistic diversity, and meaningful participation. Consequently, their capacity to enable transformative forms of social innovation remains constrained. The study concludes that while AI-enabled multilingual platforms may reduce language barriers and facilitate the participation of minority and vulnerable groups, their democratic and socially innovative potential depends on the alignment between technological and user design, governance arrangements, and the extent to which they enable inclusive participation and knowledge co-creation.